


Veritas

by Anglophile_Rin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Hell, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 05:02:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anglophile_Rin/pseuds/Anglophile_Rin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He always asks why.<br/>Tell him the truth.</p><p>Thirty years after Dean's sent to Hell (at least it's thirty to him), a woman hears a ragged voice in her ear telling her the last advice she expected to get in perdition - to tell the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Veritas

She’d say that sobs tore at her throat, but the figure of speech seemed so ridiculous now that she had had her throat literally torn out over and over and over; first by the Hellhounds, and then by demons who liked to jam fingers and spikes into every area of flesh that made a person subconsciously flinch and curl, the body trying in vain to protect the soft flesh and exposed arteries.  
  
Of course, those instincts were born of self-preservation - an innately animal drive to survive. Here, however, no one actually _wanted_ to survive, but everyone did. They survived and survived and survived...  
  
They never spoke to each other. Not until after. After they stood waist deep in the contents of their own waist and their souls had been clawed and chewed, stabbed and bled and burned just enough that their eyes shone black with the charred remains of what had once made them human and now made them so much more and so much less.  
  
At that point they would speak, but only to whisper the mimicked horrors that had once tickled their own ears like spiders burrowing for homes, and hiss the threats that were never empty because what was the point when you could literalize every thought and whim and nightmare?  
  
(She heard you stopped dreaming when you turned - that it was the final, never-ending torture bestowed upon the children of a malicious and hateful father. At this point, though, she’d have given anything to keep at bay the unbidden images of a life no longer in her grasp - it seemed like a gift more than a curse and of all that came with the black eyes and cold hearts, this, to the exclusion of all else, she would welcome with open arms.)  
  
This lack of speaking, of communicating, of sharing and noticing and being was why she was too shocked to turn away when an anxious voice rasped in her ear - a hurried and ragged whisper, words thick around the stump of a tongue slow to regrow.  
  
“He’ll ask you why you’re here. Tell him the truth - he’ll know if you’re lying. The truth may benefit. He always asks, tell him the truth.”  
  
The ragged voice belonged to eyes still blue, not yet reflecting a soul blackened to embers by pain and hate. Demons lied - but this wasn’t yet a demon. Why had he spoken? They never spoke to each other.  
  
She had no time to digest his advice. As soon as he’d passed she felt the tug of the hooks in her shoulder, her waist, the fleshy bit of skin and tendon between thumb and forefinger, the sensitive expanse behind broken knees. She was being carried, dragged, keelhauled to another rack. Another knife, another set of black eyes to bore into her flesh while a razor carved it out and a voice hissed acid to curdle, singe and burn.  
  
It had been eight years, for her. She had no idea how many lips had spilled poison into her ears and spleen, how many knives had carved or hacked or whittled or painted the body they had given her made in equal parts of her own soul and memories, black smoke and sulphur and brimstone and lies. Enough that she knew what was coming, but too few for her to be numb to it.  
  
They said you never became numb to it.  
  
The hooks were tethered to chains on a rack like a cross and she wept because once she had worn a cross around her neck and once she had prayed and laughed but now she just screamed and begged and knew no one would hear because voices couldn’t carry past the freezing cold - the chill which could only be achieved by a void, a vacuum, a complete absence of God and love and anything but pain, pain, pain, pain, the glee and horror of pain.  
  
Her head snapped to the side, her cheek stinging from the slap. A slap could still sting. She wasn’t allowed in her own thoughts, the blow told her. She now lived in his.  
  
“I asked you why you’re here.”  
  
He always asks. Tell him the truth.  
  
“I...” she hadn’t truly spoken in eight years. She had forgotten how. Her vocal chords only knew the shapes of screams and sobs. She might have been able to form a ‘please’, a prayer, a name, once upon a time. But now only the cries of the slaughtered tasted right on her tongue.  
  
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll only assume the worst. I’m sure you belong here - most of you do.”  
  
“Rachel.” she gasped, the name winding it’s way up from the recesses of her broken mind. “My daughter, my Rachel. She was dying. She was only three, and they didn’t know why. Doctors couldn’t help, God wouldn’t help, so I asked a demon. She was thirteen when I left. She was beautiful and kind. She deserved to live. I don’t regret it. She was my baby. She is my baby. She deserved to live. I’d do it again.”  
  
“You’re not lying.” He told her. She felt relief. She hadn’t even realized that she hadn’t been sure. The eyes in her head felt heavier with black every day, and demons lied.  
  
He started with fire - hot and bright and consuming her whole, the flames dancing in a mockery of merriment reflected in his green eyes.  
  
He was at work a full half an hour before she realized. His cuts were precise; carefully aimed in location and depth to strike that which is most sensitive and bloody without risking the loss of consciousness. But she didn’t feel any of it. She was numb.  
  
Except, you were never numb. Not here. Not in the hands of someone like him, someone who had learned his lessons strung up in Alistair’s rack. Facts swam through her consciousness, floating past the darkness behind her eyes. Third degree burns, she remembered. They destroyed the nerve endings. There was no pain. She was all third degree burns. Today her body was burns and smoke and fire and the name Rachel still sweet on lips turned to coal.  
  
When she was dragged off again, hooks now piercing bones where skin and muscle had fallen off like overdone barbecue, those crumbling coal lips found the ear of the next in line.  
  
“He’ll ask you why. Tell him the truth.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have always thought that Dean wouldn't have jumped right into hardcore torture. He would have had to justify it to himself - to punish the wicked while somehow protecting the (sort of) innocent, all while complying with Alistair's demands enough the stay off of the rack himself. 
> 
> Some people feel he had started to enjoy it, that he had gotten lost in torturing. And that's fine. But I think you only had to listen to him describe it to Sam, or beg Cas not to ask him to do it to know that he never enjoyed it. He hated every second of it. That, and Dean Winchester was never one to blindly do as he was supposed to - he loves his little rebellions.


End file.
